Month: June 2016

This past Sunday, June 18, was marked Autistic Pride Day. While usually cognizant of these occasions, last month was the first I recalled such a day. The day is a celebration of neurodiversity, and the potential of all people to be contributors to society. As you can guess, we show that we’re proud of our identities, abilities, and communities. One thing I am thankful for as I’ve become older is that my idiosyncratic behaviors and quirks are now seen as second nature, versus when they were ridiculed during my school years. That is probably because our culture has encouraged inclusion recently, making it less of a fight to get others to understand.

At first, I questioned why there is a day for pride among us when we have a month dedicated to acceptance. I doubt that commentators and pundits will start complaining about “the autistic agenda” or something, but considering the amount of people who have revealed their diagnosis I can see why this could be viewed by some skeptics as a fad. However, my thought is that there is a small difference between the intent of each. Autism Awareness Acceptance Month is meant to reach out to others on how we can still be members of society with abilities more so than deficiencies. It’s a time to educate others. Autistic Pride Day, however, is our day; we show the world how we’re proud of how we were born. It’s a time to show off.

Both of these are relatively interchangeable, as we often have to make people aware of the differences between autistics and NTs while highlighting our own abilities in the process. What I reflected on when Sunday came and went was the achievements and the chance to focus on an optimistic view of autism. As I have written before, there is still a great stigma over how we are

In one of the online communities I browse on occasion, I encountered an excellent blog post from spectrum advocate Alyssa Huber about what Autistic Pride Day means, and what it does not mean, which can also apply to the month.

How I see it, it’s a way to humanize autism. It shows that we are not just a cluster of symptoms. It shows that we all have a place in this world. It shows that like everyone else, we have our own unique personalities, perspectives, strengths, and weaknesses, and we should accept each other as humans even if we are different.

As for what it does not mean, The post came up after a derogatory comment In various circles (particularly when it comes to politics), I hear a line from someone such as “everyone gets offended too easily.” Well, there are reasons why we get offended, as this meme on Huber’s post demonstrates.

Though I would argue that the media has rolled back its perpetuation of these talking points. Now the focus is more so on subsets like anti-vaxxers.

What offends me is the ignorance and the stigma.

So how I look at Autistic Pride Day is one where we highlight the accomplishments of those on the spectrum and how they have proven themselves to be just as capable as their NT neighbors. Yes, someone will consider it ‘just another movement,’ but it’s still my movement as a person who still sporadically fights to assimilate, and I want to be a proud part of the movement. I end with a comment from that post explaining what makes this important.

Autistic pride as a movement is very, very meaningful to me. [After the diagnosis] I initially felt so, so alone, almost as if I was now officially on the outside looking in at society. It felt like a label that said ‘I don’t belong here.’ When I started blogging about my autism, however, I discovered a huge community of fellow autistic adults, people like me who were seeking to be understood and accepted by society, and I realized that yes, I do belong here. I belong on this earth, in this society that may not be ready to accept me yet but someday will. I’m determined to insure that this society takes me as who I am, not who it wants me to. I am good, I am valid, I am autistic. And nobody can take that away from me.

So I’ve really slacked on blogging since starting my own website. My thought was with my own domain that I would do this more. I have a lot of partial drafts right now that are eager for publication.Well, hopefully I have motivating myself merely by typing that.

Moving on…

This past Saturday, I took part in a SQL Server 2016 Discovery Day in Raleigh-Durham, to learn about the new features in this year’s edition in a hands-on environment with some of the PASS data available to the public. It was a pretty solid way to spend a really hot weekend afternoon, geeking out over bells and whistles and data we don’t always get to access. First, our chapter leader (or as Kevin refers to himself, Grand Poobah) gave a presentation concerning all of the new features that made the 2016 edition the best one yet for all of us who spend a ton of time working within the Microsoft stack. I particularly looked forward to putting with the Transaction Performance Analysis Overview into action, along with checking out R Services. The second presentation was one on columnstore indexes delivered by MVP Rick Heiges (fun fact…he’s related to a former president of my alma mater, which is how we first made acquaintance some time ago). Indexes aren’t my strong suit, so I can only say that he showed us how this index focus will make it easier for folks like me to improve in that facet. Then it was time to form teams and start hacking it.

In five hours, and with about ten hours worth of PowerBI under my belt, look what I made in school today.

We were given some really dirty data sets (IMO, at least) and would use these to create analyses on geographical locations on SQL Saturday and Summit attendees, and correlations between the topics presented and virtual chapter membership. Our group (Team Cheetah) had a diverse background from database engineers to report writers. We really focused strongly on the PowerBI aspect, and finding ways to clean up some of the data related to tracks and zip codes/addresses. After the fact, I realized on my part that I could have used more columnstore index feature, but I’m guessing that the leaders liked my decision to use lookup tables to make the above graphic work. I think I got a bit excited explaining how we found that topics presented within an 18-24 month span were the most frequent of Summit presentations in the next year, going on…and on…and on about the dashboards and the graphic types. After the fact, our team found more we could have done with the hours we had, but considering the rookie status we felt alright with what we would present and be judged on (use of new features, dashboards, analysis, etc). So maybe we would get points for utilizing the presentation and talking about the muddied data we had. Plus, the engineers were good at the geospatial aspect and cleansing.

Well, our team won the contest, with gift cards as prizes, so obviously that was a cool feather in the cap.

I will say that an exercise like this was rather interesting and cool, but I’m wondering what we could do for the PASS Community if we were to take this on for longer than an afternoon. If we had a team with BI Developers (like myself), ETL and data quality experts, analysts, and data scientists, then we could have some very useful information for trending. That may be the ultimate goal of this exercise, but it can become a stepping stone for a true hacking session.

Plus, this is an opportunity for a lot of the members of our local chapter to try their hand at civic hacking…myself included. One of my recent goals/fascinations has been civic hacking. The opportunity to take public data and improve a community using this information. In the Triangle alone we have many open data events, including CityCamp and Datapalooza. I’ve had a chance to sit in on some of the ideas and even add an idea in there, but a hackathon is something I’d like to try in full. Today gave me an idea on how it may work in a controlled environment, and what I could improve on when presenting findings. I would love to see more of this happen, and knowing that the community can have its own members help out with the solutions to make things better. Then, in turn, we can go out and use open data to help our communities.